Tag: rafael casal

Blindspotting, a film directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada and co-written by Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs, follows Collin (Diggs), an African-American in present-day Oakland who has just three days left on probation. Collin and his best friend Miles (Casal), a white guy with a propensity for being a troublemaker, work together for a moving company. One night after work, Collin witnesses a police officer shoot an African-American suspect in the back when the latter is fleeing. This incident creates a captivating change in reality that Collin must now cope with, riddled with questions about race, the class system, and gentrification, which ultimately threatens to splinter his friendship with Miles.

This movie is set at the intersection of ‘buddy comedy’ and ‘profound drama,’ and it uses humor in a manner that makes the film’s emotionally affecting explication of deep social issues that much more poignant and impactful – its mastering of this blend of storytelling makes it not only one of the best films about race in the present era, but one of the best movies of the entire year. Period. At the center of the story is a thriving interracial friendship between Collin and Miles, which is used throughout the film as a conduit for the exploration of privilege. The friendship is remarkably authentic, which exceptionally evokes an innate sense of empathy from the audience for the test that this friendship endures as the movie’s social issues begin to complicate the relationship between the two leads. The genuineness of Collin’s and Miles’s friendship can be credited to the real-life relationship between Diggs and Casal, who co-wrote the film – the two are childhood friends from Oakland. The film’s funniest and most heart-wrenching moments feature Collin and Miles at center stage, and their banter throughout the movie (which includes some witty freestyle rapping while packing up clients’ belongings) is outstanding. I truly think the movie thrives in a beautiful manner because of the believability of the close friendship between Collin and Miles.

Casal is wonderful in his comical, yet layered portrayal of Miles (he is at his best in one of the film’s greatest moments, where Miles is attempting to sell a sailboat), but in this film, Daveed Diggs steals the show. Diggs rose to fame in 2015 for his portrayal of both Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in the award-winning musical Hamilton, which featured a great deal of rapping and garnered Diggs a Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Musical. Prior to Hamilton, Diggs had already established himself as a rapper of the highest quality via his experimental hip-hop group Clipping. With this background, Diggs prepared himself for an enrapturing on-screen acting performance in Blindspotting, which earned him a nomination for Best Male Lead at this year’s Independent Spirit Awards. Not only is Diggs’s acting on point, but his execution of the film’s dialogue is masterful. There are parts of the film where Diggs actually raps his character’s dialogue, but even in the moments where the words are not meant to be rapped, Diggs’s cadence is still incredibly melodic and poetic. In the film’s climatic scene, Diggs’s character stares right into the camera with a gun drawn (for what feels like forever), delivering an emotionally packed monologue that feels less like traditional rap and more like performance art. The scene is the film’s most powerful, and it stands as the pinnacle of Diggs’s acting achievement in the movie.

The serious themes at issue in Blindspotting benefit from the complete package of first-rate filmmaking, and Carlos Lopez Estrada (in his directorial debut) commands the movie’s direction precisely. The movie is constantly shifting from funny to dramatic and from heartwarming to violent, and Estrada carefully constructs and intricately weaves these divergent tones into an overall great movie. The film features a set of dream sequences that Collin grapples with following the police shooting, and Estrada brilliantly tempers those sequences’ surrealism with the perfect touch of fidelity. Estrada definitely brought his ‘A game’ to this film, and I look forward to watching anything else he creates in the future. Blindspotting is ratedR for language throughout, some brutal violence, sexual references, and drug use.